Kubrick: Live CD to debrick Kindle 3, 4, and Touch

[prosty]

Well, let's start from saying how it broke:
I don't know. No one touched the kindle, except from I plugged him into the PC to charge him up. Next thing I see when I turn him on - no books, everything archieved. So I though something froze/bugged/glitched. I rebooted the kindle and.. it froze on the screen with a boy under the tree. Well, so I read it's bricked due to some strange reason.

How did I try to unbrick it:
Downloaded the dvd of kubrick, mounted it into vmware player, gone through the wizard (being sure it's not connected when it shouldn't be, it's charged up). Everything went fine, I managed to go into the fastboot here, it flashed. Then I waited for the kindle to boot to diagnostic mode. Up untill now nothing on the screen changed (only boy under the tree was there), it flashed and (I guess) started loading the diagnostic mode. Then this appeared.

How it appears to be:
I click the power button while unplugged, it blinks green and turns off. However when connected to PC I can freely go to fastboot from kubrick, etc. Also I can make it restart, then the screen blinks... and it sets itself to what you have seen.

[knc1]

Originally Posted by prosty

Well, let's start from saying how it broke:
I don't know. No one touched the kindle, except from I plugged him into the PC to charge him up. Next thing I see when I turn him on - no books, everything archieved. So I though something froze/bugged/glitched. I rebooted the kindle and.. it froze on the screen with a boy under the tree. Well, so I read it's bricked due to some strange reason.

How did I try to unbrick it:
Downloaded the dvd of kubrick, mounted it into vmware player, gone through the wizard (being sure it's not connected when it shouldn't be, it's charged up). Everything went fine, I managed to go into the fastboot here, it flashed. Then I waited for the kindle to boot to diagnostic mode. Up untill now nothing on the screen changed (only boy under the tree was there), it flashed and (I guess) started loading the diagnostic mode. Then this appeared.

How it appears to be:
I click the power button while unplugged, it blinks green and turns off. However when connected to PC I can freely go to fastboot from kubrick, etc. Also I can make it restart, then the screen blinks... and it sets itself to what you have seen.

The Kubrick CD is a "live cd" intended to be booted by the actual hardware, not by virtual hardware.

So just boot your machine from the CD, repeat the procedure.
No Vmware required.

[prosty]

Okay sir, you may be right. Tomorrow I'm gonna try and hook up some dvdrom to my PC. Gonna tell if it worked rightway.

[knc1]

Originally Posted by prosty

Okay sir, you may be right. Tomorrow I'm gonna try and hook up some dvdrom to my PC. Gonna tell if it worked rightway.

May be?

Click on the first post of this thread, scroll down to the dark green paragraph. Read it. Follow it.

[hawhill]

This. And carefully check if the downloaded copy of Kubrick is unmangled. Bit rot does happen, after all. I can't really tell how the Kindle would display _this_ picture, though. It doesn't look like a "garbage bit pattern" at all. I would not exclude the option that the e-ink controller might be partly toast. Even if a blank refresh is still operational.

[knc1]

Originally Posted by hawhill

This. And carefully check if the downloaded copy of Kubrick is unmangled. Bit rot does happen, after all.

A very good point.

There have been reported cases of a mangled download.
Corrected by just downloading again.

I use Kubrick myself, because it: "Just works".
ixtab has turned out another, very solid, "MR product" here.

[sciopath]

Hi,

I have a very similar problem.

Originally Posted by prosty

Well, let's start from saying how it broke:
I don't know. No one touched the kindle, except from I plugged him into the PC to charge him up. Next thing I see when I turn him on - no books, everything achieved. So I though something froze/bugged/glitched. I rebooted the kindle and.. it froze on the screen with a boy under the tree. Well, so I read it's bricked due to some strange reason.

Same.

Originally Posted by prosty

How did I try to unbrick it:
Downloaded the dvd of kubrick, mounted it into vmware player, gone through the wizard (being sure it's not connected when it shouldn't be, it's charged up). Everything went fine, I managed to go into the fastboot here, it flashed. Then I waited for the kindle to boot to diagnostic mode. Up untill now nothing on the screen changed (only boy under the tree was there), it flashed and (I guess) started loading the diagnostic mode. Then this appeared.

I plugged an USB key with Kubrick on my laptop. Nothing changed on the screen after a "successful" flashing, no diag menu appeared. Still on the tree.

At first I though that my 1.5 years old battery was defective but I'm not so sure anymore since I tried the Kubrick method also with my Kindle directly connected (only the + and - pads) to one of my lab power supply (4.2V). Still on the tree.

What I don't really understand is the fastboot command line. If I follow the "USB debricking for noobs (K4/K5)", everything goes smooth until

fastboot flash diags mmcblk0p2.img

always fails after 2 or 30 seconds.

fastboot flash diags_kernel diags_kernel.img

works fine

fastboot flash kernel main_kernel.img

works fine

fastboot flash setvar bootmode diags

works fine

fastboot reboot

... still on the tree.

On linux (Alt+F2, root login on Kubrick), /media/cdrom/Kubrick/fastboot doesn't seem to work at all. None of the previous commands responds when the Kindle is fastboot (although dmesg and lsusb detects the device). Neither do the http://www.sudoforlunch.org/fastboot on Ubuntu 13.04.

Any ideas ?

[prosty]

I've hooked up a dvdrom and burned the dvd. Checked the md5 sum, yet my kindle remains the same. I wonder if there were a possibility I've first flashed it with other soft (4.1.0 ) while I had 4.1.1? Or it doesn't matter? :S

[knc1]

Originally Posted by prosty

I've hooked up a dvdrom and burned the dvd. Checked the md5 sum, yet my kindle remains the same. I wonder if there were a possibility I've first flashed it with other soft (4.1.0 ) while I had 4.1.1? Or it doesn't matter? :S

That would not matter, Kubrick does a full replacement.

What else have you done?

Did you ever try to flash the device with something other than Kubrick?

Did you change any of the options in Kubrick?

[prosty]

Nope. I only used kubrick isos (dvd and cd one) from this thread. Nothing else was ever used on this kindle. All the kubrick options are by default, I didn't go into any options - just gone through wizard.

Is there any tool I should check.. anything with? Also I am really gratefull for your help so far, for that you didn't leave me behind : ) Thanks.

[knc1]

Originally Posted by prosty

Nope. I only used kubrick isos (dvd and cd one) from this thread. Nothing else was ever used on this kindle. All the kubrick options are by default, I didn't go into any options - just gone through wizard.

Is there any tool I should check.. anything with? Also I am really gratefull for your help so far, for that you didn't leave me behind : ) Thanks.

That display has been seen before (very briefly) while switching "modes" or when the switch into 'diags' does not complete.

Some Kindles are known to have been shipped with an incomplete 'diags' system image installed.

That **should not** be a problem, if Kubrick flashes the 'diags' partition first (I think that it does).

I am out of ideas here, we need to wait for the author to make a comment on this.

[ixtab]

Ok, so here's a short (but very generic) follow-up to all the problems that were posted lately.

I'm sorry for not going into all the details (in fact, I can't, because I don't know why those problems happen), and: thanks again to knc1 and all the others who are helping out

I'll try to put it this way:
1. Kubrick is not a silver bullet. It's simply a software which puts the Kindle into a sequence of different operational modes, and expects it to behave like the Kindles that I tested Kubrick on.
2. As I wrote in the very first post: I cannot guarantee that it works in every single case, but it should work in most of the cases.

That said, let's step through this, one step after another (this is for K4/K5, but the overall logic is the same for the K3):

1. The first thing that Kubrick asks you to do is to reset your device, and to put it into USB downloader mode. Unless your Kindle has a hardware fault, it *must* obey that request. You are resetting the hardware, and asking it to not boot from its ROM, but from the USB connection. So the only ways that I can think of this *not* working is a broken USB cable or some other USB problem (... or a HW problem...).

2. Then, Kubrick requests the device to enter fastboot mode. On every untampered Kindle (a Kindle which did not get its internal initialization data screwed up), this should work. In short, Kubrick sends the device a simple command to boot into uboot bist, with the fastboot option. This could fail if the USB functionality is broken (see above), or if the boot loader on the Kindle has been tampered with, so that uboot bist is not functional. Neither of these should be the case on a regular Kindle.

3. Then, Kubrick will flash the diags kernel, and the diags partition, using fastboot. If the device has correctly entered fastboot mode (which it should on all regular devices... see above), this should not be a problem.

4. Then, Kubrick will use the fastboot protocol to a) set the boot mode to diags, and b) reboot the device. Again, none of these should pose a problem for a normal Kindle.

5. The Kindle should be rebooting into a "known good" state now, because it's booting into the diags partition (which has just been flashed, see step 3) using the diags kernel (which has just been flashed, see step 3). Therefore, Kubrick is not expecting any complications.

6. Kubrick is now waiting for a USBNetwork connection to the Kindle. Again, because the diags system that is running on the Kindle is known (it has been flashed in step 3), all that it checks is for the Kindle to turn its USB network on.

7. Once the diags system is reachable through USB network, all of the rest (overwriting main partition, installing jailbreak etc.) is done via SSH.

8. Rebooting is done via SSH as well.

[knc1]

How does Kubrick configure the host networking?

Why:
Could some of these strange failure cases be IP address conflicts with other devices?
Or do you **ONLY** configure and route to usb0 ?

[ixtab]

Originally Posted by knc1

How does Kubrick configure the host networking?

Why:
Could some of these strange failure cases be IP address conflicts with other devices?
Or do you **ONLY** configure and route to usb0 ?

It doesn't do it at all (well, almost). The network setup is left to the diags partition (which will wait for the user to turn on the network, and then always configure itself to 192.168.15.244). Kubrick only waits for a usb network interface to show up, and then configures it to 192.168.15.201.

See constants, prepare_network.sh (and dig your way back up through the Java sources starting at Executables.java, if you want )

[ixtab]

Originally Posted by knc1

Or do you **ONLY** configure and route to usb0 ?

Oh, forgot about that one.

Nope. This is precisely the reason why Kubrick asks to *disconnect* all Kindles on startup.

I'm keeping track of the available usb network devices when the Kindle is disconnected. Then, I'm waiting for the Kindle to connect - assuming that the (only) new usb network device is the Kindle.

lsusbnets.sh